


the most dangerous thing left

by Engineerd



Category: Devil May Cry
Genre: Canon Compliant, Dante and Vergil pass on the Sparda family abandonment complex, F/M, Post-Devil May Cry 5
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-12
Updated: 2019-06-12
Packaged: 2020-05-01 17:42:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19182646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Engineerd/pseuds/Engineerd
Summary: “You guys ever complain about your dads together?”“Hell no,” Nico said. “Just mention Dante or Vergil and Nero’ll clam up faster than a jackrabbit. Best I’ve been able to get is a-” she started doing a terrible impression of his voice “-those bastards left me behind.”“Oh, Nero,” Lady said.(A series of vignettes)





	the most dangerous thing left

Nero wakes up gasping sometimes in the middle of the night, clutching his right arm to make sure it’s still there. His nightmares always wake up Kyrie, too. “Nero?”

“Just a bad dream,” he rasps back, rolling towards her and throwing his arm around her. “Nothing to worry about.”

She hums in response and falls back to sleep easily. Nero tries as well, but it’s hard with all the adrenaline in his system. He’s fine. He knows he’s fine. Nothing is going to hurt him.

After all, with Dante and Vergil gone, he’s the most dangerous thing left on the topside of the planet.

 

* * *

 

Money is good after the Qlipoth disaster, with all the leftover demons still around. Nero splits the jobs that come in with Trish and Lady.

It’s awkward when he works for people who’ve hired Devil May Cry before. Customers will do a double take before accusing, “You’re not Dante.”

“I’m Nero,” he answers. “Dante is my uncle.” It had been painful to admit it the first time. After a while the hurt had faded into the background, but it would come rushing back once every little bit.

“Family business?” one man questioned.

Nero bit hit tongue hard to avoid making a snide remark. “Yup.” It’d been a family business ever since Nero had bought the van, unbeknownst to him. Now he wonders - would Dante even have given him the Devil May Cry sign if Nero wasn’t a relative? Between the sign and the Yamato, he thought he was just a guy Dante had respected, maybe even liked a little. Now he looks back and sees the maybe six times Dante had come to talk to him in person in the years since they met.

“I’m Nero. Dante is my uncle.”

“Why’d he send you?” one customer asked rudely.

“He didn’t,” Nero snapped back, “Unless you can call abandoning me and the shop to go have playtime in Hell sending me, he had nothing to do with it. He’s kind of a shitty uncle, to tell you the truth.”

The customer didn’t ask any more questions after that.

 

* * *

 

Nero set aside some of his new income into a fund (well, a jar under the passenger’s seat in the van) to save up enough money to buy a nice ring for Kyrie. Or maybe just some nice materials and see if Nico could work some magic, since Kyrie deserves a hand-crafted ring.

Because Kyrie is his family. She’d grown up with him, stood by him hell and high water, loved him despite the quiet rage constantly pumping through his veins. He didn’t deserve her, but like hell if he didn’t try to.

So a ring and a ceremony would be nice, to make it official.

 

* * *

 

He overheard Nico and Lady one day. He was about to come back in the door with the pizza when he heard from the window, “Nero looks a lot like Vergil, too.”

“Oh yeah?” Nico drawled. “I never had the pleasure of meeting that particular scumbag, so I’ll have to take your word for it.”

Lady snorted. “He and Dante are identical twins. If they did their hair the same and stopped wearing color-coded jackets, no one could tell them apart. Ergo, Nero looks like Dante, Nero looks like Vergil.”

“Just like me and my Daddy,” Nico said. “I had no idea we’d be able to relate so much, when we met.”

“You guys ever bitch about your dads together?”

“Hell no,” Nico said. “Just mention Dante or Vergil and Nero’ll clam up faster than a jackrabbit. Best I’ve been able to get is a-” she started doing a terrible impression of his voice _“-those bastards left me behind.”_

“Oh, Nero,” Lady said pityingly.

“Hasn’t cried, though,” Nico said. “Which kind of defeats the purpose of the-”

Nero slammed the front door of the shop open. “Delivery,” he said, trying and failing to keep the anger he felt out of his voice. Lady didn’t seem to notice in her rush for the food; Nico just gave him a wide-eyed look (guilt?) but didn’t say anything.

The drive back home that evening was quiet.

 

* * *

 

The closest thing Nero had to traditional parents growing up were Kyrie’s parents, before they died. They had always been kind to him - maybe because Kyrie as kind to him - and they didn’t deserve to die so young, mauled to death by demons. Kyrie and Credo had been devastated.

Between being abandoned as a baby and the only other parental figures he’d known dead before he was even officially a Knight, he’d never had any illusions that being a parent meant you were anything special. Nero had never cared where he’d come from. Not until the Devil Bringer, anyway, and even then not really until he’d met Dante, when he learned that devil-human hybrids could exist.

He’d wondered whether his mother or father as a devil. Nero had to be a half-devil also; just look at his arm. Even Dante didn’t have a permanent devil arm.

_(The thought crossed his mind once - maybe twice - that maybe he was related to Dante. They had the same coloring after all. White hair? Come on._

_But no, Dante would have told him if they were related. All half-devils must have white hair. That was it. Dante would have told him if Nero had a family.)_

It didn’t matter where he came from. Kyrie was his family now.

 

* * *

 

“I’m going to tell you a story,” Trish said, calmly swinging her new sword in a clean arc to behead a demon behind her. “Don’t interrupt me until I’m finished.”

“Um,” Nero said, dodging a fireball, “We’re kind of in the middle of-”

“I said don’t interrupt!”

Nero slashed at a demon with the Red Queen in one hand a mimed zipping his lips closed with the Blue Rose in the other.

“Good,” Trish said. “I used to work with your father.”

Nero froze, and was promptly smacked across the slide of the head by a wave of black sludge.

Trish ignored him. “Well, sort of. We were both pawns of Mundus at the same time. You were probably still drooling in your cradle or whatever it is human children do while we were slaves to the Prince of Darkness. He wasn’t quite Vergil, of course. Mundus had struck him down and remade him to be Nelo Angelo. Mundus was good at recreating people like that.”

Nero swallowed and focused harder on cutting down the demons.

“It was always a balancing act with Nelo Angelo,” Trish said. “They said he got a lot of Mundus’s personal attention - to keep him in line, probably. The more of Vergil he erased the less powerful Nelo Angelo was, despite all the juice Mundus was pumping in.”

“Why didn’t Mundus just kill him,” Nero said hoarsely, not looking at Trish. He as running out of demons to hit.

She forgave the interruption. “Revenge, I think. Having the son of Sparda, his downfall, as his chief enforcer? Nothing says vengeance quite like that. Plus Vergil was just about the second strongest thing in the underworld, after King Mundus himself...didn’t hurt, strategically speaking.”

Nero took his time cornering the last demon. Trish wasn’t even pretending to fight anymore, just stood there leaning on her broadsword.

“Nelo Angelo was honorable, for a devil,” she said. “They said he never tortured anything for the fun of it and he didn’t like fighting creatures beneath him. He’d refuse to do executions if it wasn’t a good fight. Mundus didn’t like that, but he didn’t have much choice.”

Nero snorted and stabbed the last demon right in the abdomen, before he pulled his sword and and did it again.

“I only met Nelo Angelo in person once. He just about passed out when he saw me. Apparently seeing his mother’s face triggered his memories, and Mundus couldn’t have that.”

Nero whacked the demon corpse over and over and over again.

“Hey, I think it gets the picture. It’s dead.” Trish walked over to him and made a face at the corpse. “We’re done here. Let’s go get our money.”

“Trish,” Nero said, “Tell me. Is my father evil?”

Trish starts to head back to the car. “There’s worse out there, kid. Trust me.”

 

* * *

 

Nero has this daydream that his mind will wander to when he can’t fall asleep. It’s more of a fantasy, really. In it he’s got Vergil chained to a chair and jacked full of truth serum, and all the time to ask all the questions in the world.

First question. Did you know you had a son?

Sometimes, in his mind, Vergil would scoff. “Of course I didn’t know. Do you think I would let any son of mine grow up like you had? If I had known I certainly wouldn’t have left you in that orphanage.”

Other times Vergil just sneers. “I knew there was a child. I didn’t care. My father had heirs, and I wanted to cross that off the list. It’s a shame you came out so weak. I knew it was you when I cut off your arm, it was so easy-” In this scenario, Nero would stop to take the time to beat the shit out of his imaginary father in his mind.

Second question. Could you teach me?

“Ah,” Vergil would say. “You want more power. I’m impressed.” And then Vergil would teach him to dash, to warp, to conjure and control swords that were made of nothing but hurt like hell. Lessons would go great. They fought together seamlessly.

Question. Why don’t you use a gun?

Question. Are demons religious? Dante showed me the statues of the lion-god, why does praying there help you gain power?

Question. What did you want all that power for?

The imaginary Vergil in his mind would pause, and his voice would melt into V’s. “I just wanted to be protected and loved,” V said. “Without power, you can’t protect anything.”

Question. Who would you protect?

Nero had to squeeze his eyes shut as tight as they would go, but the Vergil in his mind would soften and say, “You, of course.”

Question. Do you want to meet Kyrie?

“My future daughter in law? I want to meet her right away.”

Question. Why did you give me V’s book?

“My book,” Vergil would correct. “It was the only thing I could give you at the time. I would give you the world if I had one kept in my pocket.”

Question. Why did you leave me behind? We had only just met.

“I needed to save the world from the Qlipoth,” Vergil would say. “The Yamato is the only thing that could do it. And you heard Dante - we needed you up here to protect the human world. Trust me, Nero, I would not have left you behind if I had a choice.”

The Vergil in Nero’s head was a liar, he knew that, but…

Question. Will you be back soon?

“As soon as I can.”

Good, good. Question. Who was my mother?

Vergil’s image would instantly vanish at that point, because even the liar of Nero’s imagination couldn’t come up with a single thing.

 

* * *

 

“Hey, Nero,” Nico said one day, as they headed out to for a job to dispatch a two-headed demon. “What if you had a twin?”

Nero, lounging in the passenger’s seat, took off his headphones. “What?”

“What if you had a twin out there?” Nico said. “You don’t know what happened to you as a baby. I looked it up, twins are slightly more likely to have twins-”

“I don’t have a twin,” he said definitively.

“I wonder if it’d be a good twin or an evil twin.”

“I think enough fucked-up things have happened in my life already,” Nero said. “I don’t need a twin.”

“Come on, haven’t you always wanted a sibling?”

“Kyrie had an older brother,” Nero said, looking out the window. “He died, though.”

“You and Kyrie aren’t the same person, dumbass,” Nico said, tactful as ever. The conversation drifted away to the familiar tune of Neither of Them Deserved Kyrie, and Nico didn’t bring the topic up again.

God, Nero hoped he didn’t have a twin. He didn’t want to be locked in an inexplicably stupid rivalry for the rest of his life - or worse, have to explain what happened to their father.

 

* * *

 

“Hey Kyrie,” Nero asked quietly as she slipped into bed next to him for the night. “You ever think about Credo?”

Kyrie tucked herself into his arms. “Of course,” she said. “Less, now, but still sometimes. I miss planning his birthdays. Is that weird?”

“No,” Nero said. “You love birthdays. You always saved up and made that delicious-”

“Cheesecake,” she said. “Yeah. I miss cheesecake.”

“We should have it again sometime. You think Nico likes cheesecake?”

“She’s lactose intolerant.”

“Okay,” Nero said. “A small cheesecake. Just for us.”

Kyrie smiled into his chest. “Thank you, Nero. It helps, you know.”

“The cheesecake?”

“Knowing you think about Credo too,” she said.

“Of course,” Nero said. “I...it hits me suddenly, sometimes. I don’t know how to explain.”

“I know what you mean,” Kyrie said.

 

* * *

 

He’s standing on the top of the Savior. Dante and Vergil are about to go jump into its mouth. _Don’t go,_ Nero pleads, the words coming less out of his mouth and more of vibrating out straight from his heart.

Dante laughs. _It’s because of you that I’m going._

 _What do you mean?_ Nero pleads. _I’ll fix it, whatever I’m doing, I’ll fix it, I-_

Vergil tosses him the book. _Keep it. I don’t need it anymore._

 _Father, please,_ Nero’s begging, and suddenly his hair is falling in his eyes and he’s seventeen again. _Please, don’t leave me here with the world falling apart-_

 _Sorry, Nero_ , Credo says, and he falls backwards with Dante and Vergil and the Savior shreds them all with razor teeth. Nero reaches out to catch them, but his arm is ripped off and he’s being thrown into the patch of Qliphoth needles and there’s blood running down his face and-

“Nero?”

He wakes up gasping, clutching his right arm to make sure it’s still there. It takes him a few seconds to get his breath under control. “Nothing, Kyrie,” he says. “Sorry. Go back to sleep.”

She shifts onto her side to face him. She doesn’t say anything, but she reaches out and takes his hand.

Nero grabs her and pulls her on top of him, squeezing her torso and taking long, shuddering breaths into her hair. Kyrie hums and positions herself in a slightly better position for hugging him back, but otherwise doesn’t move away.

“I love you,” Nero whispers.

“I love you too,” Kyrie says. “And don’t worry about your family, Nero. They’ll come back.”

He blinks, twice, hard. “How do you know?”

“Because you’re here,” Kyrie says. “And you’re the best thing in the universe, trust me. They’ll come back to you.”

He squeezes her more.

“You’re crushing me.”

“Sorry,” Nero says, relaxing his grip. “Sometimes you’re so amazing I can’t handle it.”

“I know,” Kyrie says. “Go back to sleep.”

And he does.


End file.
